[PLUG] Ideas for accessing old SpiritOne hosted account data?

[Rich Shepard]

On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, Eric House wrote:

> If worse comes to worst, I imagine they'll be in touch in April when the
> year I prepaid is up, as my credit card's changed and the number they have
> won't go through. :-)

Eric,

   This past August I paid half the annual fee. When SpiritOne's mail and web
servers stopped working at the end of September I could no longer send
e-mail messages as I had to forward outbound mail through their server. My
web site was also down.

   The short story is that I gave them a week to recover, then switched to
Frontier for their mimimum (15/5 mbps down/up) business package, and filed a
complaint with the Oregon AG's office asking for a refund for the four
months of service for which I paid that were not provided by them. I'm still
waiting on this. SpiritOne then had the chutzpah to charge my credit card (I
didn't know they retained the number) for the 6-month balance of the annual
fee. I immediately filed a challenge with my credit card issuer that this
was an unauthorized payment, that I was no longer a SpiritOne customer, and
that I had filed for a refund for paid-for-but-not-used services. A couple
of weeks later that charge was removed from my account.

   I've moved my web site to www.nearlyfreespeech.net which is very low cost
and essentially do-it-yourself. They just raised their base fee (for
1G/month) from $0.01 to $0.05 to support enhancing their DDoS support for us
customers.

   What SpiritOne did adversely affected many people who trusted them. Mike
Rogoway's articles on oregonlive.com reported that one couple who ran an
on-line vinyl record e-commerce site lost _all_ their data and are totally
out of business which is the worst story I've read or been told. Mike (and
I) tried calling listed phone numbers for the named CEO but there no one
answered and there was no voice mail.

   I hope you recover the data you need.

Regards,

Rich